The Reverberator by Henry James

Author:Henry James [James, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-61219-157-7
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-04-22T16:00:00+00:00

VIII

WHEN, ON COMING HOME THE EVENING AFTER his father had made the acquaintance of the Dossons, Gaston went into the room in which the old man habitually sat, Mr. Probert said, laying down his book and keeping on his glasses: “Of course you will go on living with me. You must understand that I don’t consent to your going away. You will have to occupy the rooms that Susan and Alphonse had.”

Gaston observed with pleasure the transition from the conditional to the future and also the circumstance that his father was quietly reading, according to his custom when he sat at home of an evening. This proved he was not too much off the hinge. He read a great deal, and very serious books; works about the origin of things—of man, of institutions, of speech, of religion. This habit he had taken up more particularly since the circle of his social life had grown so much smaller. He sat there alone, turning his pages softly, contentedly, with the lamp-light shining on his refined old head and embroidered dressing-gown. Formerly he was out every night in the week—Gaston was perfectly aware that to many dull people he must even have appeared a little frivolous. He was essentially a social animal, and indeed—except perhaps poor Jane, in her damp old castle in Brittany—they were all social animals. That was doubtless part of the reason why the family had acclimatised itself in France. They had affinities with a society of conversation; they liked general talk and old high salons, slightly tarnished and dim, containing precious relics, where there was a circle round the fire and winged words flew about and there was always some clever person before the chimneypiece, holding or challenging the rest. That figure, Gaston knew, especially in the days before he could see for himself, had very often been his father, the lightest and most amiable specimen of the type that liked to take possession of the hearthrug. People left it to him; he was so transparent, like a glass screen, and he never triumphed in argument. His word on most subjects was not felt to be the last (it was usually not more conclusive than a shrugging, inarticulate resignation, an “Ah, you know, what will you have?”); but he had been none the less a part of the essence of some dozen good houses, most of them over the river, in the conservative faubourg, and several to-day emptied receptacles, extinguished fires. They made up Mr. Probert’s world—a world not too small for him and yet not too large, though some of them supposed themselves to be very great institutions. Gaston knew the succession of events that had helped to make a difference, the most salient of which were the death of his brother, the death of his mother and above all perhaps the extinction of Mme. de Marignac, to whom the old gentleman used still to go three or four evenings out of the seven and sometimes even in the morning besides.

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